|
|
A few months ago I wrote a post entitled +1 is Explicit, but is not Relevance Feedback. I am often personally concerned that, with many of the posts I write, I am being pedantic. However, last week TechCrunch came to the same conclusion: +1 Is Like A Button You Push For A Treat — Without The Treat. Some highlights:
I understand the concept behind the +1 Button — it’s a smart one. You get people to click it and it improves the page’s search ranking for logged-in Google users with social connections (and eventually maybe all results). At least I think that’s how it works. But I have a hard time believing that all of you actually clicking on the button really get why you’re doing it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that you’re clicking on it! I am too on some of our stories. But I can’t help but get the feeling that it’s a bit like a cruel experiment we’re running. We put up a button, you click on it because it’s there, expecting you’ll get a treat. But there is no treat.
As I was saying a few months ago, +1 allows for explicit signaling. But that signaling just isn’t a relevance feedback-type of signaling. The person doing the clicking doesn’t actually get anything “fed back” from that action to their ongoing information seeking task. TechCrunch continues: Continue reading…
Have been on a six month blogging hiatus, and wouldn’t you know it.. it took another fun Google article to pull me back. It is a recent FastCompany piece, entitled Google to Zuckerberg, Bing: We Still Innovate. The premise of the article is that Facebook has recently partnered with Bing to deliver social search and cites Google’s slowed rate of innovation as one of the primary motivators for this move. This has left Google, one source says, “miffed and confused as to how Zuckerberg figured they weren’t innovating”.
Perhaps I could be of assistance. Continue reading…
A tweet by @akumar prompted me to punch up this quick blogpost:
as with all controversial issues, there’s a positive in google trying bing/image – that they’re not afraid to learn from competition
What Amit is referring to is the recent addition of gorgeous photographic images as search page background. See for example this writeup: http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2010/06/google-vs-bing-copycat-picture-on-prominent-page.html
He is of course correct; Google is learning from the competition. But there is another issue at play here, one that I don’t want to overlook because I feel it is very important. It is the issue of simplicity. What is simplicity? How is it defined? How is it measured? Conversely, what is complexity? What is clutter? Continue reading…
I would like to quickly follow up on my previous post on explicitly collaborative information seeking. My claim in that post was that, despite the shared terminology, a service like Aardvark (or Twitter) is not truly collaborative.
Let me be clear about Aardvark: What that service does is help you comb through a network [...]
On Twitter today, Josh Young made an interesting observation to which I would like to call attention:
Ya, @jerepick, with “fauxpen” attached, google’s “nav. search as the top of the stack” is a fragile local maximum for the web.
This observation is a followup to the web-wide discussion that Google kicked off about the meaning of open. Essentially, Rosenberg says that all of Google’s products at that are not at search layers of the stack should work toward being open, but that the search layer itself should be closed. To protect it from spammers, you understand {cough}.
Earlier in the same post Rosenberg makes a distinction between open source and open data, calling for increased openness in both. However, when it comes to defending closed-search, this distinction gets lost. But this distinction between open source vs. open data is important. Here is how it translates to the search domain:
- Open Source = Open search algorithm is about letting the world know what features are used to rank pages and how those features interrelate (are weighted)
- Open Data = Open search results is about letting users refactor, remix, reuse, mashup, store and re-search locally any and all query results that the user issues. And about letting the user use any software that they want to accomplish this — not just Google software
The excuse given about why Google cannot open up is that of spammers would be able to game the engine. But if we look closely, we’ll see that it is an excuse that is primarily, if not exclusively, related to the “open source” aspect of openness. Black hat SEO algorithmic gaming is not an issue when it comes to user results re-use and remixing.
And so the point (I think) Josh is making is that by closing not only the algorithm, but also the results of that algorithm, Google has effectively declared a moratorium on Internet application stack progress along that vertical. Google is essentially saying to the Internet: Continue reading…
There is a fantastic Google blog post today by Jonathan Rosenberg on the meaning (and value) of openness. Whooo-boy.. where do we start with this can of worms? Guess I’ll jump right in. Warning: This is probably the longest post I’ve written, so if you are easily bored, understand that this is not required reading. It will not be on the test.
Here we go:
At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses.
Agreed! I’m fully on board the spirit of this opening statement!
Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk.
True. So the question arises: What happens when being open carries with it an amount of risk? Do you open up those areas of your business as well? Or do you forever keep your most valuable layer of the stack closed and proprietary, both in terms of closed source as well as not-fully-open information?
We run the company and make our product decisions based on these principles, so I encourage you to carefully read, review, and debate them. Then own them and try to incorporate them into your work. This is a complex subject and if there is debate (and I’m sure there will be) it should be in the open! Please feel free to comment.
I like the spirit of this discussion so far. I earnestly believe that Google is debating these things internally. But I also take them at their word that they would like this debate to be in the open. Consider this blog post part of my ongoing comment, and ongoing engagement in what I consider to be an extremely important area: The organization and dissemination of information. Continue reading…
Chris Dixon has a post yesterday about search and the social graph. An interesting read, but what struck me the most was a tangent about how current search engines make money:
Lost amid this discussion, however, is that the links people tend to share on social networks – news, blog posts, videos – are [...]
Via Greg Linden, I came across this interesting quote from Eric Schmidt about the obligation to help newspapers succeed:
Finally, Eric claimed Google has a moral duty to help newspapers succeed:
Google sees itself as trying to make the world a better place. And our values are that more information is positive — [...]
What sort of information retrieval system would you build if you knew that all the users of your system would be expert or highly-motivated amateur searchers? What sort of system would you build when you have a very large collection of unstructured information, and the goal in searching that information is not to find one document (e.g. navigate to a home page), but to find (a) relationships between documents, or (b) large sets of documents that all pertain to a single topic? How would your algorithms be different? How would your interfaces be difference? How would the process itself (that middle layer in between algorithms and interfaces) be different?
Via Daniel Tunkelang’s recent post, I think that Government information might be a perfect domain in which to ask (and answer) these sorts of questions. The U.S. Open Government Initiative has as its goal the release of loads of raw government data for use by any individual or organization. How are people going to use this data? What types of questions will they ask? What types of questions could they ask, if given the proper tools (i.e. what might they not know that they want to ask, until it becomes possible?)
Two types of information retrieval might be perfect for this domain: Exploratory Search and (Explicitly) Collaborative Search. Continue reading…
A few days ago I posted a question about why modern web retrieval systems offer no explicit relevance feedback mechanisms. I wonder if it has anything to do with the following attitude, explained by one of my favorite bloggers, Nick Carr:
The problem with the Web, as I see it, is that it imposes, with its imperialistic iron fist, the “ecstatic surfing” behavior on everything and to the exclusion of other modes of experience (not just for how we listen to music, but for how we interact with all media once they’ve been digitized). In the pre-Web world, we not only enjoyed the thrill of the overnight sensation – the 45 that became the center of your waking hours for a week only to be replaced by the new song – but also the deeper thrill of the favorite band in whose work we deeply immersed ourselves, often following its progression over many records and many years. Continue reading…
|
|
Recent Comments